Abstract
In this paper, the heading control model of a center-articulated micro-tunneling robot is developed and validated by experiments conducted using an actual tunneling robot, toward the realization of autonomous navigation system. The driving machine of the tunneling robots consists of the head and hull sections connected by an articulation joint. The heading control model which describes the machine heading response to head angle command is introduced by combining a nonholonomic constraint model where the motion of the head tip is constrained along the longitudinal direction of the machine head and an ARX model describing the turning curvature respouse to head angle command. Then Kalman filter is applied to the heading control model to estimate state variables as well as ARX model parameters. Experimental result obtained with a real tunneling robot shows the effectiveness of the proposed model where the state estimation performances are verified for both the horizontal and vertical driving motions, and the heading control perfomance for the vertical motion with a state feedback controller is demonstrated.
